The West Virginia Mountaineers have had their fair share of historic football victories since the turn of the 21st century.
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MORGANTOWN — The moment of truth has arrived for West Virginia’s football team — and maybe its football program.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) — The moment of truth has arrived for West Virginia's football team — and maybe its football program.
The Mountaineers came into the season expecting to show improvement over a year ago, even though they faced a tough schedule against which they had to prove themselves.
When the Baylor Bears come to town at 7 p.m. Thursday night before what should be close to a sold out "striped" Mountaineer Field crowd and a nation tuning in on FS1, it's "put-up time" for the Mountaineers.
They opened the year with a pair of hard-fought battles, but lost both of them, to Pitt and to a now-nationally ranked Kansas team that is capturing the nation's imagination the way WVU hoped itself would.
The Mountaineers their record with a 66-7 victory over a laughable opponent in Towson, then went to Blacksburg and scored a solid win over a Virginia Tech team that is facing the same kind of struggles the Mountaineers are.
That got them to 2-2 with a chance to make a statement at Texas, but the statement they made seemed a lot like my bank statement ... overdrawn.
Texas pummeled them physically and on the scoreboard, leaving them at 2-3, still winless in the Big 12 with a physical Baylor team staring them in the eye.
Losing is no longer an option if WVU wants to have any creditability in Neal Brown's fourth season as coach. That would put them at 2-4, just as they were last year, which brought out the ugly side of the fan base that began clamoring for Brown's scalp.
Even though WVU found a way to salvage something out of the season by turning things around, finishing at 4-2 through the final six games of the regular season to end up at .500.
But any respect it had earned back was shattered with a lackluster bowl appearance against Minnesota, leaving the Mountaineers with nothing more to show for last season than another sub-.500 record.
A loss to Baylor and WVU is back to 2-4 again and still has all three unbeaten-in-conference-play teams left on its schedule in TCU, Kansas State and maybe the best of them all, Oklahoma State, to play.
And that says nothing about a very angry group of Sooners from Norman, Oklahoma, who slid to the bottom of the Big 12 standings after coach Lincoln Riley left for USC and took his "ballers" with him.
See, until WVU proves it can beat Oklahoma, something it has never done in league play, you have trouble believing it can do it this season, even if it is in Morgantown.
The home field normally is a huge advantage for WVU. Ask Baylor, which is looking for its first win in Morgantown in the decade the two have been conference rivals, which places even more weight on Brown to find a way to shrug off having three key players — running back CJ Donaldson, cornerback Charles Woods and most likely tight end Mike O'Laughlin — sidelined.
The excitement that existed entering the season was based upon an expected jump in offensive output from a young, new coordinator with a proven record of being able to score points, a one-time 5-star recruit at quarterback transferring in from national champion Georgia in JT Daniels, an offensive line built around an All-American center in Zach Frazier that returned intact and a group of maturing wide receivers.
We didn't even know about the skills that Donaldson would display from the moment he broke loose for 44 yards on his first collegiate carry at Pitt.
While improved, the offense hasn't been able to create the expected excitement or production as yet and, to be honest, Texas buried it out of the gate last week and never let it display the skills it counted upon to carry it through games such as the one against the Longhorns.
One can make excuses for a defense that has hardly dominated from the loss of Akheem Mesidor to the transfer portal, the injury to Woods that took away the top cover defender to a lack of experience ... but there can be no more excuses.
We are in an era where players as well as coaches are being paid, where ticket prices along with concessions and parking come at such a price for fans that have every right to expect more than just promises and dreams.
This is the week WVU must stand up and be counted, rekindling the expectations for this season and making the games, not the tailgates, the main attraction of fall Saturdays in Morgantown.
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